TY - GEN
T1 - Dancing to the Partisan Beat
T2 - 12th ACM Conference on Web Science, WebSci 2020
AU - Medina Serrano, Juan Carlos
AU - Papakyriakopoulos, Orestis
AU - Hegelich, Simon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/7/6
Y1 - 2020/7/6
N2 - TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.
AB - TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.
KW - TikTok
KW - US politics
KW - political communication
KW - social media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088396226&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3394231.3397916
DO - 10.1145/3394231.3397916
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85088396226
T3 - WebSci 2020 - Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science
SP - 157
EP - 166
BT - WebSci 2020 - Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 6 July 2020 through 10 July 2020
ER -